Turn 7

--- Maya ---

Knowing that she’d put a fair amount of work into her programs, she decided it was time for her to focus on some of her hardware, that way she could effectively use her programs when she needed them.

Of course, if she was going to make a dedicated effort towards her less digital projects, this meant she was going to need a fair number of parts to actually build those projects.

Hence another journey to the basement.

What she hadn’t expected was to find her usually laid-back elder brother cursing at an amp as it audibly hissed at him.

“Come on, damn it, work!”

“Uh, is everything alright?” She asked as he kicked the amp in frustration.

“Huh?” He turned to blink at her before shaking his head. “Yeah, no, I… My amp is acting up is all. Probably going to have to cancel band practice until I get this thing replaced. Which sucks since our battle of the bands thing is in a couple of weeks, and I already spent everything on replacing our other equipment.”

(Right, that’s what his bands been practicing for all summer…)

She gave the amp a look, and felt her fingers twitch a bit, because while the whispers weren’t really talking, she’d still picked up a thing or two about working with electronics.

“If you want I can give it a look.” She eventually offered, “I’ve been getting into electronics and stuff lately, so maybe I can do something with it?”

Tommy gave her a curious look. “You sure My? You’ve always been a little… klutzy. If I’m lucky it might be cheaper to get it fixed than having to replace the whole thing.”

“Just give me a chance, I can promise you a speaker is not the hardest thing I’ve worked on this summer.” (That would be my COMP.)

Tommy looked at her for a moment before shaking his head with a sigh. “Fine, it’s not like I’ve got a lot to lose right now anyway.”

“¡Muy bien!” She clapped her hands, before pointing her thumb at the stairs. “I’ll grab a couple of things from my room, and I’ll have it fixed fast.”

“If you say so.” Tommy told her in that tone that said while he didn’t believe her, he’d let her try at the very least.

(Bleh, we’ll show him not to look down on us!)

Rushing to her room she grabbed the usual tools she used for her projects -excluding the COMP and laptop she used to run her programs during the building phase of those projects- and quickly made her way back to the basement.

From there it was quick work to undo the back of the amp and take a look inside, the faintest words coming from the whispers as they waited for something to catch their attention and spark them into life.

“So, uh, what exactly is the problem?” She asked, hoping if she knew she might be able to prod the whispering in the back of her head into helping.

“Whenever I turn it on it starts hissing, even if I don’t have the guitar plugged in.” He explained.

“Uh-huh…” She nodded as she looked at the insides of the speaker, trying to figure out what might get the whispers interested in helping her. “You mind plugging it in so I can try and see what’s happening in here?” She tried as a method of stalling.

(Okay, okay… What do you guys want?) Gnawing on her cheek a bit, she let her eyes roam around the inside of the speaker, mentally marking everything that seemed important. (Hey, how much do you two think looking at this could help us with our sound tech?)

(You mean the tech we haven’t actually touched beyond manipulating sound vibrations?) Her inner reason reminded her.

She was about to give her own snarky remark, but instead jumped as a loud sound came from the speaker in front of her. “Shit that’s loud!”

“You okay?” Tommy asked, watching the way she grimaced.

“Yeah, just…” She could feel her heart pounding, and as it did the whispers grew louder, directing her attention to a bunch of little tubes in the amp. “Hey, you don’t have any spare amp tubes do you?”

Tommy blinked at her. “Uh, no…”

Frowning, she glanced around the basement. “Do you have a different broken amp or something? I know how dad is about throwing things away.”

“You mean that he doesn’t.” Tommy snorted, before shaking his head and gesturing to a corner of the basement. “I think he throws all of my music crud over there. Why?”

“I’m going to Frankenstein this bitch.” She told him, moving to the corner and shifting through a pile of junk until she came across a broken amp of the same brand.

“Here’s the coffin…” She said taking the back off of the broken amp as the whispers assuring her that the problem with this one was the speaker itself rather than the tubes. “And here’s our brain.”

“Okay, little morbid there…” Tommy commented, with a weirded-out look on his face.

“Maybe, but here’s the part we need.” She showed him the tubes she’d removed, “Now I just need to fit them in your other amp, and that should fix it.”

A few minutes later she had him turn the amp back on, and when no hissing came out of it, she replaced the back before plugging a guitar in and strumming a chord.

While she had no idea if it was a good chord, there was at the very least no distortion to it, though she figured it was good enough given her brothers impressed face.

“¡Fíjate!” Tommy exclaimed taking the guitar and giving it a test of his own. “You actually got it working.”

“Told you I knew what I was doing.” She nodded.

(See! We’ll show them all!) Her inner crazy laughed until a giggle of her own escaped.

“Never doubt you again, hermanita.” Tommy promised, as he sat down and began testing a few more chords to see if the newly repaired amp could keep up.

Looking away from the scene, she noticed a fair number of broken mics, amps, speakers, and other goodies she could still make use of. If for her own endeavors rather than Tommy’s.

“Hey, you don’t mind if I swipe some” (read: all) “of this junk for my own thing do you?” She asked, already planning to do so even if he said no.

“Go ahead hermanita.” Tommy nodded, not bothering to look up from his now working equipment as he strummed a few chords and listened to the newly fixed amp play them back.

(You know we can’t actually fit all of this in our room right?) Her inner reason pointed out. (Especially once we start disassembling all of it.)

Thinking about it, for a moment she turned back to her brother. “You going to be okay if a make a few trips for this stuff?”

“Won’t even hear you.” Tommy admitted as he turned the amp a little higher.

(See he has no problem with us coming back for this stuff later.) She told her more cautious self, as she picked up the broken amp from earlier and began carrying it up the stairs.

---

Dropping the remains of the broken amp onto the floor of her room, she began considering the fact that while she could take it apart some with the few screwdrivers and soldering bits she’d swiped from her dad’s unused tool kits, it wasn’t really all that efficient to do so.

(Thinking about it I could probably use some better tools period…)

(Unfortunately, we lack the funds to go buy them, even if we were willing to go outside.)

(Speaking of, how much longer are we going to hide out for? I mean it’s already been a week.)

Sorting her thoughts as they pulled in two different directions, she shook her head before looking for the scrap metal she’d found in the basement a few days prior.

“If we can’t buy tools than, we’ll just have to build them instead.” She told her voice of reason, as she began to gather a few small bits and pieces to run her programs through. “And as for going outside… Well, we have the Hand Cannon to defend our self, the AI to gather information and whatever else we need, and then we have the MAP () to give us a bit of warning too…”

(Hmm, I suppose we don’t really need much else then do we?)

(Does that mean we’re going out again?!) Her wilder half asked with glee.

“Maybe…” She hedged, “Give me a bit to think about it. Right now, we have work to do.”

Getting back to the task at hand, she took what bits of the scrapped car part she could, and using some careful placed Heat, welded them together into what the whispers assured her was a working, if not actually good, shape.

Sadly, since this was her first time working with anything bigger than a laptop circuit board, her first attempt was…

(Crap scrap!) Her inner child laughed.

“Damn it!” She cursed, tossing the twisted metal aside.

(Well, look on the bright side. We still have a few parts we can use to make something, and you now know what not to do.) Her inner reason offered in attempt at optimism.

“Right, right…” She agreed after a calming breath. “Just give me a second.”

Taking a bit of time to work through her frustration, she pulled out what little remained of her workable scrap metal and began working what she could to try and create something resembling a decent tool.

And eventually she managed to succeed at this endeavor, creating tools better at soldering than her own, while also capable of working on metal. If at the cost of rendering portions of any metal she worked with unusable due to the need to roughly cut through said metal to work it.

“Mm, it’s good enough for now, but we’ll have to make something better eventually.” She told her other selves, as she tested the new tools out.